LIFE QUOTES XXIX

quotations about life

Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.

FRANK HERBERT

Chapterhouse: Dune


How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, "When I am a big boy." But what is that? The big boy says, "When I grow up." And then, grown up, he says, "When I get married." But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to "When I'm able to retire." And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Feast of Stephen


Life is but sighs; and, when they cease, 'tis over.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

Imaginary Conversations

Tags: Walter Savage Landor


Every day is a careful balance fought between the despondency that threatens to swamp me and the incredible joy of living.

CHRIS ABANI

Kalakuta Republic

Tags: Chris Abani


Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Middlesex

Tags: Jeffrey Eugenides


I look at it this way: How much of the day are you awake? You think, "I've gotta get that dry cleaning, I gotta get this going, and this, and this, and this." And all of a sudden it's dinnertime. And then there's a moment of connection with your spouse or your friends. Then you read and go to bed. Wake up and then it's the same all over. You're not awake, you're not living, you're not experiencing. We start early medicating ourselves. We start kids early, on TV and video games and so on.

TIM ALLEN

Reader's Digest, Oct. 2001


Every noble life becomes a revelation of the spirit which the love and joy of mankind cannot let perish from remembrance.

AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT

Table Talk


Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of the human connection: if one can live with one's own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.

JAMES BALDWIN

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Tags: James Baldwin


Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.

JOHN BARTH

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Tags: John Barth


Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.

GLEN DUNCAN

The Last Werewolf

Tags: Glen Duncan


We cross the stream of life at different places. Some wade through the shallows in a drought, others have to swim across deep waters in a storm.

CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM

The Maxims of Marmaduke


That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

JOHN BANVILLE

The Paris Review, spring 2009

Tags: John Banville


Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world's wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say shocking, realisation. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly ever wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there.

JOHN BANVILLE

The Sea

Tags: John Banville


Life is dangerous. That's what makes it interesting.

JOHN TWELVE HAWKS

The Traveler

Tags: John Twelve Hawks


I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.

JACK LONDON

The Turtles of Tasman


Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.

STEFAN ZWEIG

The World of Yesterday


Study more how to die than how to live; if you would live till you were old, live as if you were to die when you are young.

WELLINS CALCOTT

Thoughts Moral and Divine

Tags: Wellins Calcott


Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

JAMES JOYCE

Ulysses

Tags: James Joyce


My life is one long blooper reel!

TOM WILSON

Ziggy, Jan. 12, 2000


Life is a gift horse in my opinion.

J. D. SALINGER

"Teddy"

Tags: J. D. Salinger